Cruise Control

In the middle ranges, I feel nothing. 
No excitement or ambition. 
No desire to get to my destination quickly. 
If I could have the process automated, I would be all too pleased. Just set destination and let the rest do the work. Take what's needed from input and output, set levels to optimal for coasting. 
On the highway it's easy enough, but puts me to sleep dreadfully fast. 
Side streets I feel as if I could take a sharp turn at any moment and run over someone, or hit something. Navigation is not my strong suit. I can ponder a choice of rice or noodles until I forget I need to eat. 


An automated life... 
Is that so bad? Isn't that the American Dream? They say it's the journey, and not the destination. 
How does that work out when if it's not from Point A to Point B, there is no movement? There are no lines here. Just a series of points. 
Explosions of matter, dispersal patterns. 
How best to move safely through them without collision?
Automated, on cruise control.

The Day The LOLcats Died

This bloody thing deserves it's own posting. Only problem is my blog here isn't blacked out. I'm not nearly that industrious.

Review: Woken Furies

Woken Furies by Richard K. Morgan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Ok, so I finished, and as is the case with much speculative science fiction, it kind of loses it's way after the major concepts are explored.

With a name like angelfire, could we expect the Orbitals to be anything else? Icarus Reborn as a title would have been too blunt, and has already been taken.

But along with that seemingly innate desire for immortality of the iD, there's an acceptance that the form of ascended/digitized sentience may be more of a shared experience. That sharing will render those unprepared gibbering mental zombies jettisoned off as floatsum into lower mechanized or biological life. But for those comfortable with their revolutionary riders, religious delusionaries and alien intelligence, it'll all be beaches and cream.

So in that sense, an exceptionally hopeful book.



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I dream of another me, one that made different choices...

Woken Furies
thoughts so far

Ok, I can see the arc of the trilogy now.

1. Altered Carbon - coming to terms with the trans-humanist condition of an existence that relies upon a sentience unbound
2. Broken Angels - acceptance of the human species being only a part, and a rather parasitic and unimportant part, of the continuum of sentience
3. Woken Furies - recognition of our existential quandary. our own individual self is both completely unremarkable, replaceable, multiplicative and derivative; and inexplicably precious.

I'll have more to add later I suppose.


One thing that does occur to me in this universe Morgan has created.
There has been little exploration so far as to how these technologies have impacted (or eliminated) families. It seems that the only ones that bother to reproduce and have any familial bonds at all are the poor and inadequately stacked. As lifespans increase, even now we see that the prospect of _death do us part_ is much more frightening when it might mean sixty or eighty years, when it used to mean twenty or thirty. When your identity can persist for hundreds of years... What would create a truly enduring bond in a world where even your connection to yourself was as ephemeral as the clothes you take off at night?